The results are in and the SitePoint PHP blog has officially announced the most popular PHP IDE based on the answers to their survey. The overall winner is PHPStorm (from JetBrains) but several others weigh in on their editor of choice too.

This article will focus on the IDE results alone. We'll analyze the PHP community in general in a future piece after the data has been cleaned to a greater extent. Please note that these are preliminary results, and not much detailed filtering has taken place yet. The data will still be processed and additionally verified. The ballpark is in the correct ranges, but cannot be deemed precise (might be off by a couple dozen in every category - not enough to influence the end result), hence only percentage values will be displayed in the charts. For exact figures, see the raw data.

The results show PHPStorm coming in at first place in both the business and personal votes with Sublime Text and Netbeans pulling in behind for 2nd and 3rd. The post also shares comments from some of the votes, people adding some of their own thoughts and reasons for their choice of editor/IDE. Other tools that were mentioned include Vi, TextMate, Eclipse/PDT and Dreamweaver.

On the IT World site there's an interesting post that poses the question - does relying too heavily on your IDE make you a bad programmer?

The truth is that a good IDE makes you vastly more productive than a bad one or none at all. Projects are off the ground faster thanks to helpful scaffolding. Coding moves faster thanks to intelligent autocompletes and IDE refactoring tools. Integrated unit testing helps your application be more maintainable. Built in deployment tools, web servers, code analysis, and compile time bundling streamlines the workflow. It also standardizes the developer experience which benefits both the programmer and the business.

He mentions the original post that got him thinking about the topic. It talks about the reliance one developer feels like they now have on their IDE. They feel that it's "made them lazy" in their development practices. The article isn't specifically focused around PHP as there are IDEs for other languages that do a lot more for work for you. There are some in the PHP world, like PHPStorm that do rank up there as far as automated features, though.

We all have our favorite IDEs/editors when coding. Mine is PhpStorm, and it took a while to master all its shortcuts and establish a rapid workflow. In this article, I'll share some keyboard shortcuts and tips with you which you should make part of your regular routine if you, too, do your work in this IDE. This article was partially inspired by this Reddit thread, and will be mentioning and demonstrating some of the shortcuts found there as well.

He breaks it up into three main categories with several points each, some with (animated) screenshots:

For my CFP I wanted a few more fields of information than the "out of the box" setup, so I quickly added them to the app. However, doing this meant the included unit tests would fail. But wait, I hadn't run the unit tests yet! I realized immediately how spoiled I had become with today's modern frameworks with a testing method built in. This little project did not have that luxury, so I would need to run the tests the old fashioned way, or let an IDE do it for me.

He opted for the latest PHPUnit that the OpenCFP project required (and was installed via Composer) and put the executable path into his project's settings. Then all he needed to do was add a run configuration for the PHPUnit runner and telling it where the actual tests lived.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new article from Martin Psinas about moving to cloud-based development for your PHP applications (using online editors that can potentially replace your local development tools).

I knew going into this purchase that the Chromebook was designed without a hard drive and is intended more for casual web surfers rather than power users, but that didn't stop me. I also knew I wanted to take full advantage of the Chromium OS as an on-the-go platform so installing a LAMP-based development environment or tinkering with the system would just defeat the purpose. I decided it was time for change, time for liberation!

He talks about some of the basic concepts behind the move to a cloud-based environment and working with various aspects of development there. He covers things like version control, finding a place to store his code and choosing an IDE. He links to a few options including ShiftEdit, CodeEnvy and Cloud9 (his choice).

If you're a PHPStorm user, you already know some about what the IDE can do and the features it brings to the table. If you're not, though, the folks at JetBrains have put together a set of tutorial videos to help introduce you to this powerful tool.

A lot of PhpStorm users have been asking us to create a series of video tutorials. Today, we're happy to announce the availability of about two hours of video tutorials around PhpStorm which Maarten has been working on for the past few weeks. JetBrains.TV and YouTube playlist are also available.

Videos already in the list introduce you to the IDE and its basic features, actions and navigations, several PHP-specific development topics as well as ones related to HTML-specific development.

On the VG Tech blog today there's a new post introducing Selenium testing to those that might not have heard of it before for functional testing. It's a powerful tool that can even be used from inside PHPUnit tests to automate evaluation of your frontend application.

When we develop code at VG we have started to use Selenium tests for continuous integration. This allows us to easy write tests that programmatically checks that last commit didn't break anything.

He describes some of the types of tests Selenium can do and mentions the IDE that can hook into Firefox and record your actions and translate them into tests. This includes the ability to export them to PHPUnit tests (sample code provided) that extend the "PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase." An example screenshot of what the IDE running looks like is also included.

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in the IDE. Since I'm not a Java guy, writing a plugin was not an option. Fortunately, PhpStorm (or WebStorm for that matter) provide support for issuing commands from the IDE. Which led me to think that it may be possible to hook up the Windows Azure Command Line Tools in my IDE.

He shows how to add a new "framework" to the IDE for the Azure CLI tools and how to get to a command line from inside the editor. From there you can execute any of the Azure CLI calls just as you would outside of the IDE (like his example, creating a new site called "GroovyBaby").

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new article posted that has a review of PHPStorm, an IDE from JetBrains that focuses on providing a great experience for PHP developers and tons of features.

It's said the tool doesn't make the craft - a carpenter can drive a nail into a wooden plank using a hammer, a rock, another plank, or his forehead, but he'll rarely choose anything other than the hammer. [...] I'm talking about using a text editor versus using a full-fledged PHP-dedicated project-oriented IDE for PHP application development. Both will get the job done, but productivity-wise, one is obviously a better choice than the other.

Bruno Skvorc goes through a brief summary of what the editor is about and talks about some of the more notable features including:

Being built on Java (good and bad)

The IDE being strictly project-oriented

Supports the latest PHP version, including 5.4

Smart refactoring

Good intellisense support

He also mentions the plugin architecture that's included with the product and a few of the more handy plugins available. They're also running a giveaway in collaboration with the PHPStorm folks and are giving out IDE licenses and copies of SitePoint's "PHPMaster: Create Cutting Edge Code" book (rules are included in the article).